Managing the details of a company's exhibit program requires some pretty well-developed organizational skills. But it also takes some quick reflexes – especially when you've got someone in the company who commits you to things and forgets to tell you about them.

That's exactly what happened to me when I was working as a marketing assistant and trade show coordinator for a small manufacturing company a few years ago. The company's president was also its owner, and he had brought the company up from nothing over the course of 20 years, having filled many of the work roles there himself at one time or another. So it didn't come as much of a surprise that he had a keen interest in our trade show program; in fact, he was the one who had been managing shows shortly before I started.

When I came on board, the company participated in a handful of shows each year, and the owner had given me a calendar of the events we were already signed up for plus a list of those to watch for in the coming months. So even though I was a rookie at the company, new to the manufacturing industry, and fairly green in the trade show world, I was feeling pretty confident that I would have the role well in hand without too much trouble.

What I soon realized, though, was that to have it in hand was going to mean wrestling it out of his, because it seemed that my boss was having a hard time letting go of some of the exhibiting responsibilities. All show-related mail and email was being sent to his attention, and I was only getting what he remembered to forward my direction. But the reality was that he didn't have time to manage those functions anymore, and my job performance was at the mercy of his memory – a fact that made me nauseous. I had to wedge myself into the information pipeline to keep abreast of what I was supposed to be doing, so I made calls and sent emails to show organizers on his list, introducing myself and asking to be added as a contact for the company.

Then, in an ever-so-orderly fashion, I created a wall-sized calendar that had show dates, form deadlines, literature inventories, and so on, and as my boss surveyed it, he nodded approvingly at the care I was giving to his pet program. But what he apparently didn't do was compare it to the list of shows that he'd compiled for himself, because while they almost matched, they didn't exactly match, and "almost" only counts in hand grenades and horseshoes.

So one day when my boss passed me in the corridor roughly a month after I'd started and asked when I would be leaving for the National Plastics Expo, my mind whirled through things written on the wall calendar. Coming up blank, I reluctantly admitted I didn't know what he was talking about. He visibly blanched and said it was the company's biggest show of the year, a triennial event – in a couple of weeks, mind you – that we had been signed up to exhibit at for a long time. This made me go even paler than him, and if someone had walked by that hallway, they would have thought there were a couple of ghosts standing there staring at each other.

I opened my mouth and tried to say something, but it came out sounding pretty much like gibberish, or an injured wild animal. I had been so methodical in my process. How could I have missed a line item on the page? My boss's face went from white to red to purple when I told him that I didn't think a show by that name was on the list. Frightened, I said I would get it sorted out one way or another, and I raced off to my office.

The very first thing I did was reach into a filing cabinet and pull out the original paper the owner had given me with our shows listed on it. I didn't want to point fingers, but I did need to know whether it was I or someone else who dropped the ball. I nearly wept with joy when I saw that it wasn't on the paper I'd been given. According to the info he had provided, my first show was four months away.

Next, I had to get my arms around what I needed to do. Did we have carpet? What about electricity? It occurred to me that I didn't even know where the show was, much less what had been done for it so far. The show's website said the event was in Orlando, FL, and an email from show organizers that my boss finally forwarded to me put me in touch with the people who could get me all of the information that I needed.

When I phoned the show-organizer rep, she listened to my frantic overview of my situation, but she didn't seem excited at all. She checked and confirmed that we had a booth space reserved and nothing more. We could still order show services, she said, but since we had missed every deadline for every possible need, it was going to cost us a fair chunk of change.

Fortunately, our exhibit was a pop-up display for a 10-by-10-foot space, and the show was at a convention center where I would be allowed to set it up myself. But I had not yet seen the booth, as I'd joined the company during a trade show lull (or so I thought), and hadn't gotten around to setting it up. Word on the street was that it was in good shape, but I needed to give it a once over myself.

As soon as I could, I raced to our storage area. Here, I found the booth folded neatly in a crate in the back, so I cleared out some space in the center of the room and put it together. It wasn't the fanciest display I'd ever seen, but it was generally in pretty good shape, save for a few creases and scuff marks. Regardless, with a show less than two weeks away, it was going to have to be just fine.

Then I called my husband and informed him that I had booked a trip to Florida the following week. He thought it was a joke at first, but I quickly convinced him by relaying the details of my insanely overpriced travel arrangements. By the end of the day I was able to walk into my boss's office and tell him I'd taken care of everything, though I also had to tell him we'd probably spent twice what we should have because everything was so last minute. Trying to be as tactful as possible, I showed him the original list and asked if we could sit down and go over it together. For safe measure, I asked our bookkeeper for a printout of show-related costs for the past three years, and I pored over it looking for any other gaps in my calendar. I learned the hard way that those were things I should have done when I walked in the door, because I'm better at managing trade show exhibits than I am at reading minds.